Lament of the Mind

I think I’m gonna start blogging about my experiences with derealization and dysmorphia when they happen. They’re a couple of issues that I don’t talk about much, because I figure they’re always going to be part of being me, without any way to fix them.

When things inside my head get bad, sometimes I start to lose grasp of who I am. Sometimes it’s a “I’m a stranger in this body” feeling, sometimes it feels like I’m real but nothing around me is, and sometimes it gets much, much weirder than that. I can fall into states of depersonalization for hours, sometimes days… I try to go about my life as normal, and there are a lot of things that can keep me anchored, but sometimes I’m just straight-up not here.

While that sounds terrifying, sometimes cool things DO happen. I can enter intensely creative states, going into absolutely unbelievable chains of thoughts. I can generate an entire universe in my head in a couple of hours, just letting my mind float off and thinking about what I see. It’s a little hard to bring out of my headspace though…I don’t do particularly well in bringing those thought-worlds to life so that other people can understand them. I’m working on it, though.

What always amazes me is the realistic feeling of these worlds. Some are so obviously fantasy or sci-fi that they couldn’t be real, but yet still terrifyingly realistic within their own logic. Others… honestly, it scares me sometimes. They look real. They feel real. They act real. They almost literally seem like mirror-universes to our own, only with…differences. Sometimes small differences, other times large ones, but all so frighteningly realistic. They COULD be our world, if X Y and Z had gone differently.

During my derealization periods, these worlds that my mind comes up with are real to me. They feel more real than the real world, and I could totally slip into them if I let myself. I drift back into the real world pretty easily…I need to eat, I need to use the bathroom, I’m hypersensitive so the littlest thing bothers me and I’m back. It’s like a super-real daydream sometimes.

I’m honestly just afraid that one of these days, I’m going to go to one of those worlds in my head…and not come back.

Anyway, I’m blogging about this right now mostly just to get it off my chest. I’ve been thinking about it a lot today…kinda let myself float away a bit earlier, for an hour or so. If just one other person reads this and is in the least bit interested or amused, I’ll be alright. This stuff’s mostly to help me, anyway.